Career Mapping for Employees
Career mapping is the process of creating multiple career paths that can serve as a guide to employees as they consider options for their career development. A career map acts as a career progression framework to clearly outline the possible pathways that employees can pursue as they progress in their career. The career map outlines the suggested key steps and development opportunities that can lead to various career goals. Career mapping supports career growth for employees as well as future growth for the organization.
Career Pathing vs Maps
It’s important to understand the difference between career mapping and career pathing. While they work together in providing career guidance to employees, they are distinct from each other. Career pathing refers to creating a single, linear career path that takes an employee from one starting point to a specific endpoint.
Career mapping is a career progression framework that shows multiple career paths an employee can choose. Career pathing may be limited to one organization or industry, but a career map can potentially plot a course across an entire career, including changes in industry, roles or enterprises.
Career Mapping Benefits
Career mapping provides multiple benefits. It offers an opportunity for an enterprise to create career paths that align with organizational objectives, such as reducing skills gaps and other long-term goals.
Career mapping necessarily includes thoughtful definitions of various roles. This provides transparency and clarity, helping managers and employees stay on the same page about what a job entails and potential career development opportunities.
Career mapping also helps foster employee retention and job satisfaction. It helps enterprises demonstrate that they’re offering employees long-term opportunities to grow with the company. This creates trust, employee engagement and a positive culture that encourages employees to stay with the enterprise rather than search for opportunities elsewhere. It also contributes to a culture of internal hiring, which results in better performance and stronger institutional knowledge.
Career mapping provides strong support and motivation for workers to take charge of their career planning and get the experience they need to make their career aspirations a reality. It also provides structure and support for training and development opportunities to build a more highly skilled workforce.
Career mapping also aids in succession planning efforts by highlighting how employees can work their way to key roles in alignment with company needs and offering experiences that prepare them to succeed as they move into new roles.
Building Out a Career Map at Your Organization
Building out a career map at your organization is s multistep process, but it starts with assessing where the company is now and where it aspires to be. The organization should take a good look at its overall goals, how human resource flows fulfill current company needs and plans for future growth. Elements to examine could include:
- Employee retention rates
- Succession planning
- Ability to fill open roles
- Crucial skills needs now and in the future
- Current career pathways and mapping
Once the organization has a clearer picture of where things stand, it can start making its career map strategy a reality. Key steps include:
Define Roles and Profiles
An effective career map depends on a through inventory and understanding of the available roles within a company so that career options for employees are clear and comprehensive. Job descriptions should include education, accreditations and skill sets required for the job, including technical skills and soft skills. Organizations should also identify skills gaps so they can create career maps that offer employees training and growth opportunities to help close these gaps. As part of this process, it’s helpful to identify roles that can include cross-training or mentoring of other employees.
Create Paths to Move Vertically or Laterally Between Them
Once you’ve identified and defined organizational roles and their requirements, you can link these roles together into career paths. Then these paths can be linked into a larger map. This often takes a visual form that makes it easy to see the various pathways that can be taken from a specific position.
It’s important to keep in mind that career pathing isn’t limited to an upward trajectory, as in the classic corporate ladder — although moving vertically to a leadership role may be the ultimate objective of some employees. The career mapping process can also include career paths that flow laterally or follow a career lattice framework. Career mapping helps show the big picture of how an employee can move from their current position to their ultimate objective, and it’s crucial to map out a variety of potential career development paths.
It’s also important to make career mapping realistic. Employee career paths should be logical and attainable. And the career map should constantly evolve along with the organization. As new markets, priorities and skills emerge, career maps should be reviewed and changed as needed.
Identify and Structure Development Opportunities
Career mapping isn’t just about visualizing career pathways that already exist. It also involves creating opportunities to help employees make the journey from their current position to their dream job. Often this requires learning new skills and other professional development. The enterprise should ensure training and development programs are in place and available. These opportunities help employees gain new skills to help them advance their career, but they can also help employees gain more self-awareness and understanding about the direction they ultimately want to take.
Professional development can take many forms, including:
Mentorships
Mentoring offers a way for employees to get personalized advice, guidance and support in working toward their career goals and maximizing growth potential. Mentoring and career advancement go hand in hand. In fact, 71% percent of employees with a mentor say their company provides them with excellent or good career development opportunities, while just 47% of those without a mentor say the same, according to the CNBC/SurveyMonkey Workplace Happiness Survey. Mentors have always informally helped employees with career planning and figuring out next steps in career progression. Mentors have even more tools at their disposal to help their mentees along their career path when an organization has an institutional career mapping program.
Whether an organization already has a mentoring program in place or wants to establish one as part of career mapping initiatives, the right technology can streamline mentoring program setup and administration. Chronus mentorship platform offers features such as automated mentor-mentee matching, seamless integrations into enterprise tools and granular reporting to reduce administrative effort and increase impact of mentoring programs.
Employee Resource Groups (ERGs)
ERGs offer employees a chance to join together in a group, often based on shared identities or interests, for mutual support. These groups provide opportunities for personal growth, networking and learning about different roles within the company while developing strong personal relationships.
Skills Training
Every employee should be constantly learning new skills, which can range from technical skills training to soft skills development. Employees should have a variety of options for skills development, from formal courses to ongoing online courses to one-time, in-person workshops or even job shadowing and exchanges. Offering upskilling opportunities offers big benefits to employers as well as employees. For example, research from MIT has found that one soft skills training program offered a return of around 250% on investment within eight months.
Education
Educational opportunities for professionals can range from pursuing academic degrees to earning professional accreditation and certification. Enterprises may subsidize and support outside education or even provide their own in-house learning.
Work With Your Employees
In formulating a career mapping strategy, organizations should keep in mind that the career mapping process should be collaborative. The enterprise should be working together with employees on a mutually beneficial career progression framework.
A key part of this is getting feedback from employees to inform the career mapping strategy. Organizations should seek to understand employee sentiment, such as how employees feel about current career pathing, which career advancement opportunities they’re interested in and what types of professional development are important to them to ensure that career pathing and mapping are relevant to the needs of the workforce.
At the individual level, career mapping should be a personal and customized exercise. Whether employees work with HR leaders, managers or mentors to work on mapping their future career growth, the process should feel collaborative and affirming. When career mapping is successful, it’s energizing, exciting and motivating for everyone involved — and that can translate to positive momentum for the entire organization.
The work doesn’t end when a career planning session concludes. The organization should offer ongoing monitoring and support to track the employee’s progress and offer help when needed.
Career Mapping For Employees
Career mapping offers employees the opportunity to work in partnership with their employer to fuel their professional development. It shows employees a variety of possible career paths, not just one, giving employees the chance to drive their own personal growth and career progression.
Benefits for employees include:
- The career mapping process encourages workers to really think about what they have to offer and what they want to achieve in their careers. This in itself is a valuable exercise for any employee.
- Once employees have a better idea of their career goals, career mapping makes it simple for them to see what they need to do to get where they want to be.
- Employees enter into a dialogue with managers about their career goals, enabling transparency and helping leaders to better support employees in reaching their ultimate objectives.
- Career mapping fosters training and development opportunities that benefit employees over the long term as they seek career growth.
- Career mapping provides flexibility as well as direction. No career map is set in stone for any individual and it can be reconfigured to grow with employees who decide to take a different turn.
A Strategic Investment in Growth and Success
Career mapping isn’t a simple or surface exercise. It requires an enterprise to do the digging to identify and understand the career pathways that currently exist within the organization and how they align (or don’t) with the organization’s mission. It requires the vision to imagine what those pathways would look like in an ideal world and make connections between roles — even those that don’t yet exist. And it takes a commitment to help employees reach their growth potential so that the company can achieve success. It requires an enterprise to go deep — with the potential of deep rewards as well.
